Ellen Davidson is passionate about teaching and learning. She has extensive experience teaching both general education and special education in urban, rural, and suburban settings. She began teaching in a very small Appalachian school in West Virginia in fifth through eighth grades, continued to teach in an upstate New York school kindergarten through fourth grade and, more recently, taught in an alternative urban one-room school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in all grades.
Davidson has been involved in diversity and equity education for her entire life. Rethinking Schools published the fourth edition of a teacher resource book she co-wrote with Nancy Schniedewind, Open Minds to Equality: A Sourcebook of Learning Activities to Affirm Diversity and Promote Equity. Working on a new edition provided her with the opportunity to celebrate the accomplishments of collaborative movements and help young people identify why these were successful. It also provided the opportunity to explore current issues and name some of the work that still needs to be done. She is a frequent presenter at national and regional conferences of the National Association for Multicultural Education.
Davidson's major academic focus is mathematics education — especially in elementary and middle school. Pedagogically, she is a constructivist, believing children learn more deeply when they experience disequilibrium and then put together a more robust understanding of an idea. She provides consulting in the Boston Public Schools as well as in other urban districts, Chicago and Pittsburgh among others. She has done extensive work with the Education Development Center in writing Lenses on Learning, curricula for school administrators about mathematics reform.
Recreationally, she enjoys quilting and other textile crafts.
Courses
- Issues in Teaching and Learning for Middle and High School Teachers
- Mathematics for the Elementary and Early Childhood Classroom
- Practicum Seminar: Elementary
- She also supervises interns during their year-long practicum placements in school
Research/Creative Activities
Davidson is very interested in the intersection of equity and mathematics education.
While working on the fourth edition of Open Minds to Equality, she investigated the experiences of documented and undocumented immigrant children, school-age transgender children, Muslim children and families in the US, and bullying programs that focus on the "isms" as central to bullying.